On April 17 the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Services
downtown St. Paul
had an Open House for Employers and Businesses.
The purpose of the open house was to demonstrate technology that may
improve communication and productivity in the work place for employees who are
deaf, deaf-blind, and hard of hearing.
My purpose in going was1) to make that all important
connection to the community, 2) to see their latest technology with regard to the deaf, deaf-blind, and hard of hearing, and 3) to inform them of what the St. Paul
Public Library has to offer in the area of Assistive Technology.
The room had various vendors and service organizations that
displayed: alerting devices, assistive
listening devices plus their accessories, communication devices, telephones
plus their accessories and one really cool miscellaneous “E-Scope II Belt
Stethoscope.”
My interactive experience was with the Ubi-Duo: This was invented by a father that wanted to
have a nice conversation with his son without having to use sign language and
it was quite fun having a conversation with Mary on these devices.
Software I was particularly interested in was called Interact-AS. This software supports written, spoken, and
typed input. Also, a transcript and
voice recording of an entire conversation can be saved for future
reference. With regard to this software,
the most important feature that could be useful to us is the translation
feature. You can write, speak, or type
in English and have it translated in 36 different languages. In turn, other languages can be instantly
translated into English. A drawback -
the 36 languages do not include the language Karen.
I left with a good amount of information and catalogs. If you would like to learn
more about Deaf and Hard of Hearing Services you can visit their website
at www.dhhsd.org.
